Resolving Individual and Abstract Anaphora in Texts and Dialogues

This paper describes an extension of the dar-algorithm (Navarretta, 2004) for resolving intersentential pronominal anaphors referring to individual and abstract entities in texts and dialogues. In dar individual entities are resolved combining models which identify high degree of salience with high degree of givenness (topicality) of entities in the hearer’s cognitive model, e.g. (Grosz et al., 1995), with Hajičová et al.’s (1990) salience account which assigns the highest degree of salience to entities in the focal part of an utterance in Information Structure terms, which often introduce new information in discourse. Anaphors referring to abstract entities are resolved with an extension of the algorithm presented by Eckert and Strube (2000). The extended dar-algorithm accounts for differences in the resolution mechanisms of different types of Danish pronouns. Manual tests of the algorithm show that dar performs better than other resolution algorithms on the same data.